Search engine optimisationFor Bricks 'n' Mortar Retailers

Ankur Sharda@shardinator

instorelocal search optimsationbricks and mortar

Today over 60% of discretionary purchases start online,
and despite the rise of e-commerce, the vast majority of those purchases
are still happening in physical stores. However almost no bricks-and-mortar
retailers are successfully marketing themselves to the local online shopper.
Instead their online presences mimic those of online-only stores and fail to
get the results they could.

A quick search engine optimisation primer

Getting good results in search engines depends on two main factors.

Credibility The magic of Google’s early success was that
it could figure out which sites were the most credible, and so
avoid returning junk. It did this by looking at how web pages
linked to each other and based on this, gave each page a
‘credibility score’, officially called PageRank. The higher the
credibility the higher the ranking in the results compared to
other relevant content.

Relevance No matter how credible a site is, Google won’t
display it if it’s not relevant to what the searcher is looking
for. Most of your relevance score will come from the words you
have on your page, where they appear and to what extent they
match the user’s query.

As a simple example, if someone searches for “ladies jeans in claremont”
and if there are two similar results one with the URL

someshop.com/womens/jeans/henry-skinny-jean

And the other with the URL

someshop.com/claremont-west-aus/womens/jeans/henry-skinny-jean

It’s very easy to see which will rank higher.

Hint: it’s the second one.

How to do local SEO

So the question is, how do you target local searches, without “un-targeting”
non-local searches.

Unfortunately none of the existing website/ecommerce platforms make this
easy. None of them are designed to funnel local customers to your retail
locations when they are explicitly searching for local products. They choose
instead to try and mimic Amazon and other online-only players, in a futile
attempt to beat them at their own game.

The very best way “to do local”, would be to have a locally targeted page
for each product, in addition to the standard product page (if you don’t
have a product page, you really need them). The local page would be linked
to from the main non-local page.

The locally focused page, would also include the product info, name, images,
description etc, but along with that there could be information specific
to that location. Naturally you’d have a phone number and address as well
as possibly a map, directions to the store, information about where to
park or how to catch public transport, a local Facebook feed, and importantly
perhaps some functionality to check inventory at your store right from your
website (this is where we can help).

Remember this doesn’t replace your existing product page. That remains,
while this acts as a funnel for search engine traffic. It’s win-win. The
only catch is, today there’s nothing off-the-shelf that will let you do
it easily.

How Instore can help

That’s where we can help. Our solution isn’t the the most powerful form of
local search optimisation, but it is the easiest.

Our Instore widget connects your point-of-sale to your website ‘automagically’.
By automagically we mean, you click a few buttons and the whole thing is
done in 20 mins. It does need to be seen to be believed.

The Instore widget makes it easy for your shoppers to get product inventory
at your local store(s). This encourages online visitors to visit the store,
and encourages repeat visitors to your website, as they know they can get
detailed information that other retailers don’t provide.

Better still, having Intore embedded on your website helps boost your
search engine presence in general and in particular for local product searches.
Google reads and indexes the widget’s addresses and locations,
and gives you a boost every time someone is searching for a similar product
in your area.
We're happy to chat over email/phone to explain this in detail, but in short:

The widget includes the locality names and addresses of your local
stores, these are read and indexed by Google and your relevance
for such queries goes up.

When a shopper includes locally targeted keywords in a query,
they see the location name in the description, making them more
likely to click.

Shoppers are more likely to use your site as a resource, and visit
without a search engine. Companies like Google can record
this and give you a further search engine boost.

If you’re unsure of why you should trust us, our very first experimental
site had over 800,000 visits in two years (I’ll happily share the Google
analytics data with you if you ask), simply by using these techniques to
target local shoppers.

Our Instore widget is the easiest way to optimise your website for local shoppers.